I will be the sole director of the seminar. There will, in addition, be three visiting lecturers.
Prof. Gregory Nagy is Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC (see http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~classics/people/nagy.html). He is a world-renowned authority on Homer and the history of the early transmission of the Homeric texts. He was Sather Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, where his lectures were on “Homer the Classic.” Professor Nagy will visit during the first week and will talk to the seminar about Homer and the scholia.
An early modern specialist (to be announced).
Prof. Ruth Scodel, a Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan and acclaimed Homerist (http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Erscodel/home.html), will be informally involved with the seminar (on demand).
Prof. James I. Porter. I am Professor of Greek, Latin and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, having received my PhD at UC Berkeley and my BA at Swarthmore College. My areas of expertise are in literature and philosophy, literary theory and aesthetics, the history of materialism, and intellectual and cultural history. More recently, I have developed certain sub-specialties in the reception of antiquity, histories of disciplines, the problem of classicism and the classical ideal, and philosophies of life, value, and pleasure.
My interest in classical reception has also issued in administrative projects. In 1999-2000, I conceived and helped inaugurate an initiative called “Contexts for Classics” (CFC), an interdepartmental consortium at the University of Michigan devoted to the classical heritage, with both curricular and other implications (including outreach). Classical reception is a burgeoning element in the arsenal of classicists these days, and one of the main avenues of communication between classics and adjacent disciplines. Secondly, Oxford University Press in fall of 2005 launched a book series in classical reception (“Classical Presences”), the very first of its kind. I was honored to be asked to co-edit this series, which has been expanding at an unexpectedly fast rate.
I am currently completing several research projects, one of which is a two-volume study on the origins and development of aesthetic inquiry in antiquity (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press). The other is a book project on the evolving conception of Homer from archaic Greece to the present, entitled Homer: The Very Idea (forthcoming, Chicago University Press) A pilot of this appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Homer (2004; earlier version in the journal Arion). An essay on Auerbach's Jewish identity as it manifests itself in "Odysseus' Scar" and in his other writings, "Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology," will appear in Critical Inquiry in 2008. I have published fairly widely on the reception of Homer in the ancient scholia and in modernity, from F. A. Wolf to Nietzsche (Porter 1992; Porter 2000a, ch. 1 (part); Porter 2004b; Porter forthcoming). And I have taught a courses in Classics and in Comparative Literature on Homer, classical reception, canonization, and classicism. (You can see a list of my book publications and current book projects here.)
A. INTELLECTUAL RATIONALE
B. CONTENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROJECT
C. PROJECT FACULTY AND STAFF
D. SELECTION OF PARTICIPANTS
E. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR PARTICIPANTS
F. INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT
G. DISSEMINATION AND EVALUATION
G. DISSEMINATION AND EVALUATION
COURSE MATERIALS TO BUY/READ IN ADVANCE